Sober Woman Dating a Drinking Man

Asked by an Anonymous User on 2018-05-8 with 1 answer:

Hi there. I have been dating a great guy for 4 months who doesn’t drink a lot and treats me well. I have never seen him overindulge, but his friends are partiers. Sober for 8.5 years, I am okay with evenings out with people who are drinking as long as I can leave when I want. This is where the problem comes in. He says he’s fine with it, but the nonverbals disagree. This weekend we went to his friend’s b-day in Tahoe and it was 16 partiers (pot and alcohol) and me. I was unprepared for the pot and thought the gathering was going to be much smaller. I’m fine in a lot of situations, but the truth is, I don’t want to feel obligated to spend the weekend in a party house with people drinking and getting high. I told him this and his response follows, “Well, I want to hang out with you and with my friends. They drink, which is what will be going on if we’re hanging out. If you don’t want to interact with them then that’s going to create distance between us and I don’t know how this will work.” I don’t feel like I have to spend every moment with the person I’m dating (would actually prefer not to) and am fine with him going on weekends without me or staying somewhere away from the party. This keeps coming up for us and the truth is that even though I care about him and we get along really well, my party life is behind me and I don’t really wish to spend a ton of time in places where the MO is getting drunk. His drinking doesn’t bother me, but feeling pressure to participate in that environment is stressing me out.

I think he said it all when he said it was a deal-breaker if you had boundaries about his drinking friends. You have worked hard to achieve your sobriety and sometimes people come into our lives to help us establish limits. This sounds like the case here.

I don’t think this is a black and white thing. I think the idea is for you to say you don’t know how it will work either and you are willing to go forward on a situation-by-situation basis. These things tend to sort themselves out fairly readily. Stand your ground. You are looking to be a priority in someone’s life and if that is not on his agenda then you need to find a situation where that is as important to the other person as it is to you.

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Daniel J. Tomasulo, PhD, TEP, MFA, MAPP

Dan Tomasulo Ph.D., TEP, MFA, MAPP teaches Positive Psychology in the graduate program of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, Teachers College and works with Martin Seligman, the Father of Positive Psychology in the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Director of the New York Certification in Positive Psychology for the Open Center in New York City and on faculty at New Jersey City University. Sharecare has honored him as one of the top 10 online influencers on the topic of depression. For more information go to: http://www.dare2behappy.com/. He also writes for Psych Central's Ask the Therapist column and the Proof Positive blog.